Running a small business generally requires you to focus your energy efficiently. There are critical tasks that need to be accomplished regularly and effectively, such as communication with your employees, financial management and more.
Technology has evolved in recent years, making it easier than ever to manage a growing small business and even to potentially increase revenue in the process. Smart business owners can examine the numerous apps and online tools that are currently available, and they can use the tools that are the best fit for their specific challenges.
These are some of the leading apps that small business owners may find useful on a regular basis.
QuickBooks
Financial management tasks can take up a considerable amount of your time and energy each week, so finding a way to improve your efforts in these areas is vital.
QuickBooks is among the most popular financial applications that business owners use. Its many functions and applications make it easier for you to analyze your financial situation at a moment’s notice. You can also create reports, set up notifications or reminders and more.
Expensify
Expense reports are necessary in order to properly reimburse your employees for their work-related expenses. However, creating expense reports and properly documenting the expenses with receipts is a time-consuming process for all involved.
Expensify is a user-friendly app that lets your employees create a report and upload an image of the receipt on the spot. You will then receive the expense report and related documentation for easy financial management. In addition, the documentation is available for review and analysis later when you are processing your business tax return.
Trello
Keeping your team on track with various projects is rarely easy to do. You need to ensure that everyone knows that is going on and what their action items are. You also need to log communication for all to see.
Trello gives you and your team access to a dashboard that updates events in real-time. You can customize the dashboard so that it more closely meets your unique needs. This dashboard may include a list of items that you need to do, those that have already been done and more. You can even toggle between different teams to see the statuses of various projects that you are working on and to ensure that each employee is completing the required tasks.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a powerful sales management tool that makes it easy for you and your team to manage leads and walk through the sales process. All communications with your leads and status updates can be logged through this CRM.
You can also plan future activities and set up reminders or notifications for them. This is a robust resource with extensive applications and benefits, but it has a streamlined process that makes it very easy for most people to learn how to use with minimal time and effort required.
OneDrive
The ability to access your files at a moment’s notice is critical if you want to work in the most efficient manner possible. Through OneDrive, you can save documents, images, videos and other types of files in the cloud.
You can then access any files that are saved in this app from a remote location. This eliminates the need to take a portable drive with you and to ensure that the portable drive contains the most recent versions of files that you may need. Altogether, OneDrive helps you to work more efficiently and to eliminate redundancies, and it may offer your entire team similar benefits.
MailChimp
Creating effective, well-designed marketing material is essential, and delivering your marketing message to your target audience in a timely manner is equally as important. MailChimp has customizable templates that let you create professional-grade marketing material with ease.
It also lets you plan and schedule automated delivery of your marketing messages. Savvy business owners are also concerned about the results of their efforts. Through MailChimp, you can create attractive and easy-to-understand reports that enable you to make smarter business decisions going forward.
HootSuite
Social media marketing is an affordable way to communicate with your target audience and even to drive sales. Through HootSuite, you can more easily manage all aspects of social media marketing.
This application lets you track all of your accounts in an efficient manner. It also gives you exceptional reporting tools, and it facilitates the two-way communication benefit of social media accounts.
Final Thoughts
Running a business effectively today requires you to be on the ball in all areas of management and operations. Your competition may be using some of these same tools to gain a competitive edge in different ways, and this means that you need to be using them as well just to keep pace. Spend time learning the ropes with these tools and resources so that you can take full advantage of the benefits that these resources provide to you.
